FREUD
If we do not know the laws of our environment, we
cannot know ourselves, and if we cannot know our-
selves, we can never be free. If we are full of bitter-
ness, and this bitterness is the outcome of an inevitable
instinctual strife, our hearts can never be sweetened.
If we owe no vital part of our consciousness to our
environment, it is of no value to change it. * New
skies/ said Horace, * the exile finds, but the same
heart/—If we regard the categories of the present as
final, and the present is full of despair and neurosis,
of slumps and wars, we can never pass beyond diem
to a successful issue At the best, like the neurotic, we
can only return to a former successful solution at an
infantile level—to feudalism, barbarian group-leader-
ship, unanisme, Fascism. Indeed Jung invokes as our
only salvation this very regression, appealing to the
old barbarous mythologies to come to our aid, Freud
at least has the courage to spurn this way of escape,
and so, like a Roman stoic, in decaying classical civilisa-
tion he treads the die-hard path, and drinks the cup
of poison to its dregs.
This conception, apparently refined, of the last fetal
battle of the gods, is really barbarous, and the first
step in the path to Hindoo resignation and vegetable
sanctity. Spengler is the prophet of this resignation to
one's own limitations:
'Only dreamers believe that there is a way out.
We are born in this time and must bravely follow the
path to the destined end. There is no other way.
Our duty is to hold on to the last position, without
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